Military Selection

Recently I have been trying to post on matters Medieval; however I always have one foot firmly in the 19th century. In the book Galileo goes to Gaol and Other Myths about Science and Religion there was quite a good essay by Robert J Richards on the German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel. Richards has had something of a longrunning spat with Daniel Gasman over how much inspiration the Nazis took from Haeckel’s work (see here and here). The full text of this essay happens to be online here and I thought it was fairly successful. Anyone familiar with the history of the Third Reich knows what a hopelessly confused mish-mash of ideas National Socialism really was; hence one can find many antecedents but no single blueprint.

The part I found the most interesting was Haeckel’s idea of ‘Military Selection’, a phenomenon he noted during the Franco Prussian War of 1870-71. He appears to have been under the impression, that while the most heroic and virile men were manning the front and getting slaughtered, the most cowardly and feeble men were manning the bedrooms and propagating themselves. Haeckel writes:

The opposite of this artificial selection of the wild Redskins and the ancient Spartans is seen in the individual selection which is universally practised in our modern military states, for the purpose of maintaining standing armies, and which, under the name of military selection, we may conveniently consider as a special form of selection. Unfortunately, in our day, militarism is more than ever prominent in our so-called "civilisation"; all the strength and all the wealth of flourishing civilised states are squandered on its development; whereas the education of the young, and public instruction, which are the foundations of the true welfare of nations and the ennobling of humanity, are neglected and mismanaged in a most pitiable manner. And this is done in states which believe themselves to be the privileged leaders of the highest human intelligence, and to stand at the head of civilisation.

As is well known, in order to increase the standing army as much as possible, all healthy and strong young men are annually selected by a strict system of recruiting. The stronger, healthier, and more spirited a youth is, the greater is his prospect of being killed by needle-guns, cannons, and other similar instruments of civilisation. All youths that are unhealthy, weak, or affected with infirmities, on the other hand, are spared by the "military selection," and remain at home during the war, marry, and propagate themselves. The more useless, the weaker, or infirmer the youth is, the greater is his prospect of escaping the recruiting officer, and of founding a family. While the healthy flower of youth dies on the battle-field, the feeble remainder enjoy the satisfaction of reproduction and of transmitting all their weaknesses and infirmities to their descendants. According to the laws of transmission by inheritance, there must necessarily follow in each succeeding generation, not only a further extension, but also a more deeply-seated development of weakness of body, and what is inseparable from it, a condition of mental weakness also. This and other forms of artificial selection practised in our civilised states sufficiently explain the sad fact that, in reality, weakness of the body and weakness of character are on the perpetual increase among civilised nations, and that, together with strong, healthy bodies, free and independent spirits are becoming more and more scarce....

If any one were to venture the proposal, after the examples of the Spartans and Redskins, to kill, immediately upon their birth, all miserable, crippled children to whom with certainty a sickly life could be prophesied, instead of keeping them in life injurious to them and to the race, our so-called "humane civilisation" would utter a cry of indignation. But the same "humane civilisation" thinks it quite as it should be, and accepts without a murmur, that at the outbreak of every war (and in the present state of civilised life, and in the continual development of standing armies, wars must naturally become more frequent) hundreds and thousands of the finest men, full of youthful vigour, are sacrificed in the hazardous game of battles.

It’s curious to see what is essentially an anti-militaristic argument coupled with a proposal to murder disabled children. This kind of rhetoric of racial disintegration was pretty much par for the course in the late 19th and early twentieth century. One recalls Francis Galton’s infamous plan to ‘restock Africa’ with ‘Chinamen’.

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The Great Translation Movements

“seeing the abundance of books in Arabic on every subject, and regretting the poverty of the Latins in these things, he learned the Arabic language, in order to translate. To the end of his life, he continued to transmit to the Latin world, as if to his own beloved heir, whatever books he thought finest, in many subjects, as accurately and as plainly as he could.”

Extract from the life of Gerard of Cremona

Latin scholars in the 12th century recognised that not all cultures are equal. They were painfully aware that with respect to science and natural philosophy, their civilisation was manifestly inferior to that of Islam. They faced an obvious choice: learn from their superiors or remain inferior forever. They chose to learn and launched a massive effort to translate as many Arabic texts into Latin as was feasible. Had they asumed that all cultures were equal, or that theirs was superior, they would have had no reason to seek out arab learning and the glorious scientific legacy that followed would not have occured.

Edward Grant - The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages

Whatever the causes, the effects of the 12th century Renaissance were dramatic. It was a time of broad based cultural change across Europe in almost every field. The Gothic style of art developed and along with it the age of the great cathedral building. In religion, reforms occurred. The Cluniac reforms and the Cistercian reforms both originate from this period. Changes also occurred in language and literature. The vernacular became used more and more often in literature and song. Similarly, in music, in law, in education, there were new reforms going on everywhere. In the case of the history of science the most important development was the initiation of a widespread translation movement. In the Middle East one of these had occurred when Arabic culture had availed itself of Greek learning. Now it was the turn of European scholars to come into contact with and build on, the philosophical and scientific traditions of antiquity and Islam translating by their corpus from Arabic into Latin.

The earliest translations appear to have been made in Northern Spanish monasteries in the tenth century. There are manuscripts that exist now in Barcelona which came from the monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll in the foothills of the Pyrenees. These talk about things like the use of the astrolabe and Arabic mathematics. The texts are in Latin, so clearly the people at this monestary had availed themselves of some of the learning around them. Gerbert of Aurillac (945-1003) was a teacher, and future Pope, who went to Spain and showed a particular interest in mathematics and astronomy (an account of his life can be found in chapter 2 of God's Philosophers). There he learned how to use the astrolabe and properly introduced the instrument back to Latin Europe. He also wrote a treatise on the abacus. These 10th century translations seem to have had very little impact. They were not widely spread outside of Spain. It was only with the political and social stability of the 12th century that an extended appropriation and assimilation of Arabic learning would take place. This would happen predominantly on the Iberian Penisula.

In the 11th century, Christian forces made substantial gains into the Islamic Empire which increased awareness of Arab learning. In the year 1085, the city of Toledo was taken, capturing a large chunk of northern Spain for the Christian west. Spain provided the prime location for translations for three reasons. Firstly, there was a settled Arabic culture. Toledo had been under Islamic occupation for 375 years, Cordoba had been ruled by the Islamic empire for 500 years. The second factor which made Spain a prime location was the presence of numerous Christian communities which had been there since the Islamic conquest. These were known as Mozarabs and they produced the first translations. These native Spaniards like John of Seville were born in Arab south but moved to the Christian north and began the translations early on. Another was Hug of Santia who was patronised by the Bishop of Tarragona in the Kingdom of Aragon. The third was the ease of travel to Spain. It is a lot easier to cross the Pyrenees from France than it is to get on a boat and go to Baghdad or Cairo.

What were the motivations of the translators?. Many of them note that their activity was aimed at curing what they called the ‘poverty of the Latins’. They recognised the riches of Arabic civilisation, learning and libraries and wanted to bring them to their native Latin culture. For example, when Robert of Ketton translated the first treaties on alchemy in 1144, he writes in the preface:

‘this is because alchemy, what it is and what its goals are, are hitherto unknown to my Latin people’.

Medieval Latins readily acknowledged the superiority of Arabic intellectual culture. In fact Arabic authorship of a text became more or less a mark or guarantee of it’s quality. This was so pronounced that in the 12th and 13th century there were Latin authors trying to pass themselves off as Arabic authors by signing their texts with pseudo Arabic names. This gave them the authority of the Arabic world. The most productive of the translators was Gerard of Cremona (1114–1187), an Italian. His students wrote of him that he:

had come to a knowledge of all of this that was known to the Latins; but for love of the Almagest, which he could not find at all among the Latins, he went to Toledo; there, seeing the abundance of books in Arabic on every subject, and regretting the poverty of the Latins in these things, he learned the Arabic language, on order to be able to translate.

He would spend the rest of his life there in Toledo and taught his students how to translate and carry on his work. He would eventually translate over 70 books on astronomy, mathematics, physics, medicine, classical works and Arabic works. He translated six works of Aristotle, Euclid's elements and the algebra and mathematics of al-Khwārizmī. (It was hard to translate al-Khwārizmī’s name so it became Algoritmi from which the word Algorithm comes). He translated the work of Al kindi on optics and vision, Thabit ibn Quarra’s very technical treatise on Astronomy, eight books of Galen on medicine; works of alchemy by Jabir ibn Hayyan(Geber) and by the pseudo Al-Razi.

Floods of translators emerged from all parts of Europe, from England, Italy Germany and even from Slavic lands to translate works into Latin. But Spain was not the only place for this type of work. Sicily in the 12th century had a stable, multi-ethnic and trilingual culture. This was because a kingdom had been set up there by the Normans. They had conquered Sicily from the Muslims and set up a court in which the languages were Latin, Greek and Arabic. There they had a very multicultural atmosphere, for example Roger of Sicily invited Arab scholars to come and work at this court, the most famous being Al-Idrisi who was a cartographer. His maps are some of the only ones which uniformly put south at the top and north at the bottom (see the image on the right).

In the 13th century a second phase of the translation movement began and the attention turned eastwards towards the Byzantine Empire. By now the Latins had a taste for classical literature and thought it would be better to get the original sources. In some sense this was right. Translation was not the high art it could have been. The greatest translator here was William of Moerbeke, a Flemish Dominican who lived most of his life in Greece. He was the bishop of Corinth and was encouraged by his friend St Thomas Aquinas to find better translations of Aristotle (Aquinas was unhappy with the quality of those that were in Europe at the time – many sentences were incomprehensible). William translated 50 books, including everything we have now of Aristotle. He also translated everything he could find of Archimedes.

Interestingly not much classical literature appears to have been translated in these paticular movements. Instead the focus was primarily on logic and natural philosophy which indicates there was a strong demand for these in the 12th and 13th centuries. There was some need that had to be filled by natural and philosophical works, a need fuelled by the schools started by Charlemagne’s edict. These schools developed as important centres of learning and rapidly replaced rural monastic centres as the focus of intellectual study. The educational institutions which developed in the 12th and 13th centres in turn would give rise to a peculiarly medieval institution, the university.

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A Spectacular Invention

If anyone examine letters or other minute objects through the medium of crystal of glass, if it be shaped like the lesser segment of a sphere with the convex side towards the eye, he will see the letters far better and they will seem larger to him..such an instrument is useful to all persons and to those with weak eyes, for they can see any letter, however small if magnified enough.

Roger Bacon

One of nature’s great inventions is the human eye. Unfortunately it is also one which has a particular biological problem which usually manifests itself around the age of 40. Here the lens begins to harden, a condition which can bring about farsightedness (presbyopia) and cause the organ to no longer be able to focus on close objects. Until the 13th century the only way to cope with this was the use of crude magnifying glasses and crystals. Then in 1285, a breakthrough was made. In 1306 a sermon was given by a Father Giordano de Pisa, in which he said:

‘Not in all the arts have been found; we shall never see an end of finding them. Every day one could discover a new art...It is not twenty years since there was discovered the art of making spectacles that help one see well, an art that is one of the best and most necessary in the world. And that is such a short time ago that a new art that never existed was invented..I myself saw the man who discovered and practiced it and talked with him’

This announcement was probably meant to spread the word outside the monasteries to the general public who could make good use of the invention. The craft of making eyeglasses had evidently been established by a small group of artisans. Pisa at that time had a thriving glass industry with many mirror and drinking glass makers. The inventor himself had chosen to remain secret, probably more out of commercial self interest than personal modesty. The first spectacles produced were simply two magnifying glass handles riveted together and hung on the nose. The convex lenses were manufactured from quartz or beryl. These were difficult to keep in place and several different methods were tried. These included hooking them to a hat brim, attaching them to a plate over the forehead, clamping them on the temples and putting spatula like extensions under that hat. The lenses themselves were probably not of great quality, however they did not have to be particularly accurate to fix farsightedness which simply required magnification.

When printed books arrived, the demand for spectacles increased dramatically. Mass production increased resulting in many primitive poor quality products. In 1465 the Spectacle Maker’s Guild brought in regulation and quality gradually increased. By this time similar guilds had been formed in Germany, France, England, Italy and Holland. In the 15th century, thousands of spectacles were being produced in Florence and Venice and convex lenses had been developed for short-sightedness. The Florentines in particular understood that vision declines with age and manufactured their eyeglasses in batches of five year strengths.

What was so great about this invention?. Well as one commentator recently put it, ‘spectacles have effectively doubled the active life of everyone who reads or does fine work-and prevented the world being run by people under 40’. The invention of eyeglasses had the effect of more than doubling the working life of skilled craftsmen. This was especially true of scribes, readers, instrument and toolmakers, close weavers and metal workers. Fine work and fine instruments could be produced. Scholars and copyists could continue their work and people became accustomed to the idea that human physical limitations could be transcended by human inventions.

David S Landes in 'The Wealth and Poverty of Nations' suggests that the development of eyeglasses and manufacturing of lenses pushed Europeans into other areas and prompted the invention of precision measurement and control devices such as fine wheel cutters, gauges and micrometers. This laid the groundwork for articulated machines with fitted parts. Furthermore the Europeans were beginning to move towards replication and mass production.

Importantly for the history of science, the knowledge of lenses was spreading and opening up new possibilities. In the Low Countries (which became the main suppliers of spectacles to Britain) the microscope and the telescope would be invented in the 1600s and open the door to new worlds.

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Reawakening the West

‘When the wisdom of the ancient times was dead and had passed away, and our own days of light had not yet come, there lay a great black gulf in human history, a gulf of ignorance, of superstition, of cruelty, and of wickedness. That time we call the dark or Middle Ages.’

Howard Pyle, Otto of the Silver Hand (1888)

‘Popular opinion, journalistic cliché and misinformed historians aside, recent research has shown that the Middle Ages were a period of enormous advances in science, technology and culture’

James Hannam – God’s Philosophers

‘A series of interlocked technical innovations—an agricultural revolution, new military technologies, and a dependence on wind and water for the generation of power—shaped the history of medieval Europe.....Europe transformed itself from a cultural backwater based on an economy scarcely more advanced than that of traditional Neolithic societies to a vibrant and unique, albeit aggressive, civilization that came to lead the world in the development of science and industry.’

James E McClellan and Harold Dorn – Science and Technology in World History

The twelfth century is often referred to as the first renaissance for the Latin West, a time of great intellectual revitalisation in Europe. There were a few attempts from the period around 600 to 1000 to try to reorganise and reignite Latin culture in Europe after the traumatic collapse of Roman civilisation, but these tended to be largely local and short lived. The first real attempt was by Charlemagne who was crowned first king of the Franks and then in 800, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. The so called ‘Carolingian Renaissance’ did have some effects, the most important being the edict he made stating that every cathedral and monastery must open a school. Charlemagne himself opened a palace school in his palace at Aachen and imported the English scholar Alcuin of York (705 - 804). The York school was renowned as a centre of learning not only in religious matters but also in the seven liberal arts. Sadly these nuances were lost on the Danish Vikings of Ivar the Boneless who managed to sack it in 866.

Alcuin was a superb teacher and scholar who copied out classical texts. He also wrote educational manuals, (rather homo-erotic) poetry and a large number of letters. Deciding that ‘the Lord was calling me to the service of King Charles’ , and with the support of Theodulf of Orleans, Alcuin brought in Anglo Saxon teaching methods, helped run a school for both clerical and laypeople and in addition, developed a new style of writing. The Carolingian script as it came to be called was easier to write and read and was also supposed to reproduce the way the Ancient Romans wrote (which it didn’t). Charlemagne’s edict was partially urged on by his concern that even the clergy were not well educated and it took some time for it to take effect. Alcuin had written to Charlemagne that ‘If your zeal were imitated by others, we might see a new Athens rising up in Francia, more splendid than the old’ yet reviving the intellectual culture was a rather sluggish process because of the instability of Europe in this period up until the 11th century.

(It was also Alcuin who said ‘those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness’, something that remains true today, as evidenced by the Guardian’s comment is free section.)

The cultural flowering of the 12th century was sparked by a number of different factors. The first was that the barbarian raids dramatically declined in frequency. These raids, a long torment of rapine, invasion and plunder by enemies from all sides, had contributed to the gradual attrition and collapse of the Roman Empire and continued throughout the Early Middle Ages. By the Tenth century they had begun to dwindle. This allowed for the resumption of a stable coastal life and trade once again.

The second factor was the surge of the European population in the 1100s. It is very difficult to estimate what the population of Europe was in the Middle Ages, but scholars have suggested that it doubled in that century. It may even have quadrupled in a very short period of time. This meant more urbanism which allowed more division of labour. More division of labour brought more leisure time, all of which meant more space for intellectual development (Interestingly the Greek word ‘schole’ from which scholar emerges means ‘leisure’, because scholars are leisured people; apparently).

How was this population supported?. It has been suggested that there was a widespread climactic change in the period from about 1000 to 1200 in which the weather was warmer and wetter than usual. There is some evidence this is actually the case (this was the time when the Norsemen were able to colonise Greenland and sail to North America).

A critical development was the enhancement of technology which was greatly improved at the time and is covered in chapter one of ‘God’s Philosophers’. One important innovation was the horse collar. This proved superior to the old method of harnessing which used a bar across the chest of the horse (the throat-girth harness). This meant that as soon as the horse started pulling it would cut off its windpipe, thus meaning the Romans, who had used it, could not extract the maximum work from their animals. The arrival of the horse collar would allow the full use of horse power.

The widespread use of water wheels also emerged at this time. The Romans because of their slave culture did not worry about where to get power from (there were always cheap slaves). They had begun to do some interesting things with water power in the last centuries of the empire because the supply of slaves had shrunk, but by this time it was too late; order and trade had collapsed.

In the Middle Ages ,water and wind technology started developing to a greater extent. Undershot waterwheels were constructed at many sites across the western European landscape. In England alone, there were 5,624 mills by 1086 and far more on the continent .Wind was harnessed to turn windmills and tidal flow to drive tidal mills. This required the mastery of older kinds of mechanical gearing and linkage. New kinds would have to be invented including accessories such as cranks and toothed gears. These made it possible to use power at a distance, to alter it’s direction and convert it from rotary to reciprocating motion. Millwrights were increasingly able to perform an increasing variety of tasks, to grind corn, to pound cloth, hammer metal and, most importantly, mash hops for beer. Saw mills, flour mills, and hammer mills sprung up and windmills were used to reclaim land from the sea. That combined with crop rotation produced more food, which meant less work and more leisure time and so forth.

As a result, Medieval Europe rapidly became the first great civilization not to be run primarily by human muscle power. The History and Economic Professor David S Landes goes so far as to call the society of Europe in the Middle Ages ‘one of the most inventive societies history had even known’. As James McClellen writes in ‘Science and Technology in World History’:

'Europeans perfected water- and wind-driven mills, the spring catapult (or trebuchet), and a host of other devices, and in so doing they drew on new sources of nonhuman motive power. Their civilization was literally driven by comparatively more powerful “engines” of wind and water which tapped more energy of one sort or another than anywhere else in the world. Medieval Europeans have been described as “power-conscious to the point of fantasy,” and by dint of the medieval fascination with machines, more than other cultures European civilization came to envision nature as a wellspring of power to be exploited technologically for the benefit of humankind. This distinctive attitude toward nature has had powerful and increasingly dire consequences.'

See also:

How Dark were the Dark Ages? - James Hannam
Medieval Science and Justinian I - James Hannam

Stirrups, Horse Harnesses and Richard Carrier - James Hannam
The Medieval Technology Pages - Paul J Gans
The Great Harness Controversy - Paul J Gans
The Great Stirrup Controversy - Paul J Gans


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More Reason for Ya

If you are short of amusement this morning, be sure to check out the spectacle of a Neuroscience PHD student with a BA in Philosophy to his name, lecturing the scientific community on who can and cannot be 'a true scientist'. This would be like me attempting to lecture the academic community of historians on how 'you cannot be a Marxist and a proper historian at the same time'; except of course my MA is actually in the subject I would be addressing. Eric Hobsbawm would still be more than entitled to tell me to 'sod off' though.

Of note is his comment that:

While it is invariably advertised as an expression of “respect” for people of faith, this accommodationism is nothing more than naked condescension, motivated by fear. Mooney and Kirshenbaum assure us that people will choose religion over science, no matter how good a case is made against religion. In certain contexts, this fear is probably warranted. I wouldn’t be eager to spell out the irrationality of Islam while standing in the Great Mosque in Mecca. But let’s be honest about how Mooney and Kirshenbaum view public discourse in the United States: watch what you say, or the Christian mob will burn down the library of Alexandria all over again. By comparison, the “combativeness” of the “New Atheists” seems entirely collegial.

This would be a remarkable achievement, not least because a Christian mob never burned down the Great Library of Alexandria in the first place. See:

The Mysterious Fate of the Great Library of Alexandria - James Hannam
The Foundation and Loss of the Royal and Serapeum Libraries of Alexandria - James Hannam
Tim O' Neil's treatment of the New Hypatia Movie - The Great Library and it's myths
The (rather heated) discussion in the comments here
This discussion by Roger S Bagnall in 'Hellenistic and Roman Egypt'

Interestingly, Roger S Bagnall says that:

Passions still run high on this matter. When Glen Bowerstock first invited me to present this paper, I hesitated because of a traumatic early experience. I wrote an article on the Alexandrian Library on commission for a short lived magazine called 'The Dial', published for Channel 13. The editor did not like my caution about the accounts of the destruction of the library and , without telling me, rewrote the article to blame everything squarely on the Christians. Whether he hated Christianity or just liked a simple storyline I do not know'.

So far, that's all these much vaunted 'secular values' of The Reason Project' appear to consist of. Simple stories, long-winded rants and rapidly disappearing up one's own posterior.

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Ratramnus and the Dog Heads

Near a mountain called Nulo there live men whose feet are turned backwards and have eight toes on each foot. Megasthenes writes that on different mountains in India there are tribes of men with dog shaped heads, armed with claws, clothed with skins, who speak not in the accents of human language, but only bark and have fierce grinning jaws.....Those who live near the source of the Ganges, requiring nothing in the shape of food, subsist on the odour of wild apples, and when they go on a long journey, they carry these with them for safety of their life by inhaling their perfume..Should they inhale air, death is inevitable

Megasthenes’ Indica – Reported in Pliny

People in the Middle Ages inherited many esoteric ideas from antiquity, among them the belief that beyond the known world there are races of beings that look very different to humans. Although strange to the modern eye, this notion was widespread in the ancient and medieval world. In Pliny we find that Ctesias, a Greek physician, claimed that he had heard of tribes without necks . This resulted in the eyes being displaced to the shoulder. Others had eyes in the middle of the forehead. Some, like the Scythian cannibals, drank out of human skulls and used the scalps as napkins (at least they had some table manners). Still more strange were the Monocoli (Monopods), a tribe which had one leg and an enormous foot. In hot weather they would lie on their backs and protect themselves with the shadow of their feet. The Machlyes, according to Aristotle, performed the function of either sex alternatively, being equipped with the left breast of a man and the right of a woman. Some people in India would have sex with wild animals and produce children of mixed species. Other races had men with dog’s heads and tails.

Ctesias wrote:

‘In the mountains dwell men who have the head of a dog; they wear skins of wild beasts as clothing, and they speak no language, but bark like dogs, and in this way understand one another’s speech. They have teeth bigger than a dog’s...they understand the speech of the Indians, but cannot respond to them; instead they bark and signal with their hands and fingers, as do mutes’.

They attempt to cook their food, but lacking the ability to make fires, they have to cook it in the boiling sun. Their sexual activity is rather what one would expect of a canine:

‘All of them, men and women, have a tail above their hips, like a dog’s except bigger and smoother. They have intercourse with their wives on all fours like dogs, and consider any other form of intercourse to be shameful. They are just, and the longest lived of any human race; for they get to be 160, sometimes 200 years of age’.

The existence or non existence of the dog-heads at the edge of the known world being somewhat hard to verify, the idea became popularised in the medieval period, a subject documented by Robert Bartlett in ‘The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages’. The dog-heads had passed into popular legend but also into the imagination of monks and clerics due to the great encyclopaedias and standard texts of the late Roman and early Medieval world. They were probably also used as bogeymen to frighten enemies and to represent virtues and vices in Church art. Hence according to a Welsh poem, King Arthur fought with the creatures:

‘On the mountain of Edinburgh; He fought with dog-heads; By the Hundred they fell’

A story of St Christopher from Ireland depicted him in these terms:

‘Now this Christopher was one of the Dogheads, a race that had the heads of dogs and ate human flesh. He meditated much on God, but at that time he could speak only the language of the Dogheads. When he saw how much the Christians suffered he was indignant and left the city. He began to adore God and prayed. "Almighty God," he said, "give me the gift of speech, open my mouth, and make plain thy might that those who persecute thy people may be converted". An angel of God came to him and said: "God has heard your prayer."The angel raised Christopher from the ground, and struck and blew upon his mouth, and the grace of eloquence was given him as he had desired.’

Having regretted his former pagan, human-eating habits, St Christopher became baptised. As a result he gained human appearance before getting martyred.

In the 9th century a churchman called Rimbert - who later became the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen – was planning to leave on a missionary journey to the northern reaches of Scandinavia. The idea of converting Scandinavia to Christianity had been enthusiastically pursued by the Emperor Louis the Pious and Archbishop Ebbo of Rheims in the 820s. In preparation for the journey Rimbert wrote to Ratramnus, a monk of Corbie in Picardy, asking for information regarding the dog-heads, whom he thought he might encounter. Ratramnus had been sent a dossier Rimbert had put together which informed him that the dog-heads lived in villages, practised agriculture and domesticated animals. In response Ratramnus wrote his Epistola de Cynocephalis a work which would answer the question of whether the dog-heads were worthy of evangelism. The issue hinged on whether the mysterious creatures could be considered rational. Ratramnus begins by describing their manner of speaking:

the form of their heads and their canine barking shows that they are similar not to humans but to animals. In fact, the heads of humans are on top and round in order for them to see the heavens, while those of dogs are long and drawn out in a snout so that they can look at the ground. And humans speak, while dogs bark.

And yet, despite their appearance, the information Rimbert had supplied clearly indicated they were capable of domesticating animals. ‘I do not see’ wrote Ratramnus, ‘how this could be so if they had an animal and not a rational soul’:

since the living things of the earth were subjected to men by heaven, as we know from having read Genesis. But it has never been heard or believed that animals of one kind can by themselves take care of other animals, especially those of a domestic kind, keep them, compel them to submit to their rule, and follow regular routines.

Ratramnus pointed to the way in which the dog-heads ‘keep the rules of society’ and recognised the rule of law. ‘There cannot be any law, which common descent has not decreed. But such cannot be established or kept without the discipline of morality’. Unlike Ctesias’s dog-heads, Rimbert’s report stated that they covered their genitalia. Ratramnus interpreted this as a sign of decency and these and others attributes convinced him they were human; in any case, St Christopher had once been one and converted. Hence, Ratramnus concluded that the dog-heads were degenerated descendants of Adam, although the Church generally classed them with beasts. They may even receive baptism by being rained upon. Here Ratramnus was following in the footsteps of Augustine of Hippo, who had written that if the monstrous races do exist, they were created according to God’s will and, if they are human and descended from Adam, they must be capable of salvation. This would extend the Churches missionary obligation to the farthest flung parts of the earth and make ‘monstrous missionising’ a necessary fulfilment of Christ’s charge.

Lest we sneer from our Modern standpoint, it has to be pointed out that Ratramnus is responding to what he thinks is good information from a man who was travelling to Scandinavia, the edge of the known world. In his reply he is using what are recognisably modern anthropological categories to decide whether the dog-heads are man or beast. His work covers issues which were to become extremely pertinent when Europeans came into contact with other peoples in the New World and the debate began concerning whether they had souls capable of salvation and were entitled to equal dignity and universal brotherhood.

In the event, according to Bartlett, one John de Marignollis travelled to the Far East in the 1330s and looked for the monstrous races the ancients had spoken of. Unable to find the one legged monopods he concludes that the travellers who had reported their existence must have been confused by the umbrellas the Indians carried. He tried to ask the locals about the existence of the dog-heads and other tribes but unfortunately the only response he appears to have got is ‘we thought they lived where you came from’.

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'God's Philosophers' by James Hannam is available now from Amazon

The Dragons of the Swiss Alps

" Its length, he said, was at least seven feet ; its girth approximately that of an apple tree ; it had a head like a cat's, but no feet. He said that he smote and slew it with the assistance of his brother Thomas. He added that before it was killed, the people of the neighbourhood complained that the milk was withdrawn from their cows, and that they could never discover the author of the mischief, but that the mischief ceased after the dragon had been killed."

Johann Jakob Scheuchzer - 'Itinera Alpina'

The early modern period was a time of revolution in intellectual thought which profoundly altered the European relationship with nature and human possibility. That’s certainly part of the story. It was also a time in which the Royal Society took seriously a plan for an expedition to the Alps to search for dragons, a scheme supported by Isaac Newton and prompted by the work of a Zurich based scientist called Johann Jakob Scheuchzer.

In 1723 Scheuchzer, who was a correspondent of both Newton and Leibnitz, wrote a detailed study which detailed all the species of dragon which were known to exist in the Alps. He felt compelled to do this after having seen a ‘dragon stone’ in Lucerne, a type of rock which you can cut out a dragon’s head if you catch him sleeping. Scheuchzer had learnt that the technique for doing so was to first catch a dragon asleep, then scatter soporific herbs about him and cut the stone out of his head, all the while taking care not to wake him up since this will ruin the stone (luckily, in the case of the Lucerne stone a dragon had dropped it when flying past and it was picked up by a farmer called Stämpfli). This was said to cure a range of complaints including bubonic plague and nose bleeds. Having seen the empirical evidence, Scheuchzer felt that the existence of Dragons was not just common folklaw and could be logically inferred. He had reason to doubt the authenticity of the ‘dragon stone’ but decided it was genuine, firstly because a dishonest man would never have invented so simple a story, secondly because the finder was of good character, and thirdly because the stone could cure simple haemorrhages.

Scheuchzer set about collecting witness reports in the mountains, including that of one Johann Tinner of Frumsen, who had seen one of the beasts:

" Its length, he said, was at least seven feet ; its girth approximately that of an apple tree ; it had a head like a cat's, but no feet. He said that he smote and slew it with the assistance of his brother Thomas. He added that before it was killed, the people of the neighbourhood complained that the milk was withdrawn from their cows, and that they could never discover the author of the mischief, but that the mischief ceased after the dragon had been killed."

A Johann Bueler of Sennwald reported seeing " an enormous black beast," standing on four legs, and having a crest six inches long on its head. Another credible testimony came from Christopher Schorer, Prefect of Lucerne, who reported that:

‘In the year 1649, I was admiring the beauty of the sky by night, when I saw a bright and shining dragon issue from a large cave in the moutain commonly called Pilatus, and fly about with rapidly flapping wings. It was very big; it had a long tail ; its neck was outstretched ; its head ended with a serpent's serrated jaw. It threw out sparks as it flew, like the red-hot horse-shoe when the blacksmith hammers it. At first I imagined that what I saw was a meteor, but after observing it carefully, I perceived that it was a dragon from the nature of its movements and the structure of its limbs.’

Scheuchzer added these accounts to his detailed study in which he described several distinct subspecies of dragon. In writing this , Scheuchzer claimed that his sole objective was to create a ‘historical description of the dragons of Switzerland’. Some were ‘winged, windless, without feet and many footed’. There was also ‘one who had the body of a snake and the head of a cat’ (see the illustration on the right). Some of them had ‘bats wings’, elaborate crests and ‘two pronged tails’. One variety reached only two feet in maturity. Others were said to ‘breathe so hard as to draw in not merely air but the birds flying above them’. The best specimen, Scheuchzer reported was the ‘ginger tom’ which lived in Graubunden. 'This region' wrote Scheuchzer, 'is so rugged with so many caves that it would be strange not to find dragons there'. One of the questions puzzled over by Scheuchzer was whether the crest on the dragons was to be taken as a specific distinction or merely characteristic of the male. This curious work was printed in England in the 1690s and entitled 'Proof of the existence of dragons'. Members of the Royal Society in London paid the cost of publication.

In Scheuchzer’s defence, he is now considered one of the founders of paleobiology. While he believed in dragons he also spoke out vehemently against the practice of burning witches which was then very widespread. Witches and other minions of the devil were apparently all over the Alps, spreading plague, manipulating the wind and making the glaciers expand. A series of witch trials in Swiss cities were held and hundreds of suspects were tortured and executed. They were said to be spreading the plague using a potion ‘made of the flesh of a hanged person, the grease of the dead, cow’s blood, pigs’ blood and arsenic’.

These and other examples serve to remind us that the early modern period was as much a time of superstition and magic as the medieval period; in fact probably more so.

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'God's Philosophers' by James Hannam is available now from Amazon

God's Philosophers is Available NOW

God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science is now being sent out by Amazon.co.uk. It will hit the shops next week, but if you would like your copy as soon as possible (and probably cheaper than in the High Street), you can order it now.



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Futurology and the Brain

One of the more curious works of recent times was a book called ‘The Singularity is Near’ by the futurist Ray Kurzweil. In it Kurzweil claimed that between now and the year 2050 technology will have reached such giddy heights that homo sapiens will have reached a new stage of evolution and develop into cybernetically augmented humanoids with self improving artificial intelligences as sidekicks. At this point, as it is so often predicted, ‘history will end’ in a Fukuyama-esque fashion and human/civilisation will explode across the cosmos and develop into a universal super-intelligence.

This is just one of several preposterous pieces of futurology I have read this year. The first was Susan Blackmore’s article on how the ‘gene machines’ (our DNA) have created ‘memes’ (the contents of our minds) which will all come to be enslaved by the ‘temes’ (the stuff we are putting on the internet). The other was a gleeful article in one of the British tabloids which argued that we shall all be proud owners of ‘robot sex slaves’ by the middle of this century; although, if Kurzweil’s and Blackmore prophesies come true I think we would be just as likely to end up being bred as sex slaves by the robots. Frankly I am not raising my expectations and would be happy just to get a TV remote that doesn’t get lost down the back of the sofa by 2050. I can’t say that becoming the 21st centuries equivalent of Robocop is top of my to-do list.

Not surprisingly Kuzweil has been the object of some criticism, the science-fiction writer Ken MacLeod describing his vision of immortal software-based humans as ‘the rapture for nerds’. The journalist John Horgan has described it as ‘a religious rather than a scientific vision’, an ‘escapist, pseudoscientific’ fantasy; he has also mocked Kuzweil’s ambitions to ”live long enough to live forever” and resurrect his dead relatives with nanobots.

A while back, Horgan followed up ‘The End of Science’ with a book called ‘The Undiscovered Mind’ which highlighted the ways in which the human brain currently defies explanation. In a recent article called ‘The Conciousness Conundrum’ he uses similar ideas to attack the idea of the singularity and the creation of humanlike machines. Horgan writes:

In spite of all those advances, neuroscientists still do not understand at all how a brain (the squishy agglomeration of tissue and neurons) makes a conscious mind (the intangible entity that enables you to fall in love, find irony in a novel, and appreciate the elegance of a circuit design). ”No one has the foggiest notion,” says the neuroscientist Eric Kandel of Columbia University Medical Center, in New York City. ”At the moment all you can get are informed, intelligent opinions.”

The problem apparently is the complexity:

A healthy adult brain contains about 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons. A single neuron can be linked via axons (output wires) and dendrites (input wires) across synapses (gaps between axons and dendrites) to as many as 100 000 other neurons. Crank the numbers and you find that a typical human brain has quadrillions of connections among its neurons. A quadrillion is a one followed by 15 zeroes; a stack of a quadrillion U.S. pennies would go from the sun out past the orbit of Jupiter…..Adding to the complexity, synaptic connections constantly form, strengthen, weaken, and dissolve. Old neurons die and--evidence now indicates, overturning decades of dogma--new ones are born…..Far from being stamped from a common mold, neurons display an astounding variety of forms and functions. Researchers have discovered scores of distinct types just in the optical system. Neurotransmitters, which carry signals across the synapse between two neurons, also come in many different varieties. In addition to neurotransmitters, neural-growth factors, hormones, and other chemicals ebb and flow through the brain, modulating cognition in ways both profound and subtle.

It’s an interesting article and well worth reading , especially the speculation concerning the neural code (the rules and algorithms which govern the brains performance). I have recently become interested in neural plasticity, something which was dramatically demonstrated recently by the case of the girl born with only half a brain. Somehow her brain managed to rewire itself and retinal nerves that should normally connect to the missing right half of her brain have moved into two parts of the left brain, thus ensuring perfect vision. In a similar case back in 2002 a girl who had half her brain – including the speech centre- removed was able not only to recover but also master two languages. The comment at the time was that :

‘We should see the brain as a dynamic system fully capable of functional reorganisation to re-establish the most essential functions for independent survival, rather than the somewhat static collection of neurons it is often made out to be.’

Bear that in mind next time you can't remember where your keys are.

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The End of Civilisation

During the past couple of weeks I have been reading up on the 'continuity vs catastrophe' debate concerning the fall of the Western Roman Empire. There are some interesting articles online, including this dialogue between Bryan Ward-Perkins of Oxford University and Peter Heather of King's College London. Both of them are sceptical of attempts to portray the fall of the Western empire as a quiet transformation. Peter Heather's conclusion is that:

'the central Empire did not pass away quietly but was fought to extinction over a 70 year period of intense struggle. As the power of the imperial centre collapsed, local Romans had no choice but to make their peace with the new immigrant powers in the land, and their survival made it possible for some (but not all) of the successor states to use some Roman governmental mechanisms. But this kind of post de facto negotiation process absolutely does not mean that the Empire went peacefully. As all the recent evidence for fourth-century economic, cultural, and political vigour might lead us to suspect, the fifth-century Empire fought a long and determined, if ultimately unavailing, struggle for survival.'

Ward Perkins who wrote 'The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation' agrees with Heather on this point:

'neither of us have much time for the theory that the empire was quietly ‘transformed’, by the peaceful ‘accommodation’ into it of some Germanic barbarians. We both believe in invasions that were violent and unpleasant, rather than what I have termed the ‘tea party at the Roman vicarage’ theory of settlement by invitation. I probably share Peter’s views, because I have heard him lecture on the subject many times, always with great conviction! Anyway, the idea that the fifth century was more peaceful than violent, just doesn’t fit the facts. Some degree of accommodation between invaders and invaded was possible, particularly over time. But I argue that the horrors of invasion are undeniable, and were often protracted, and that adjusting to rule under Germanic masters was painful and difficult for the Romans, used as they were to lording it over the known world.'

The second part of this interview is available here. I also came across a fascinating podcast by Ward-Perkins here in which he endeavours -by reference to archaeological findings - to describe the changes that took place in this period (with particular reference to Anglo-Saxon Britain).

The lifestyle of the Barbarians can’t have been so far below that of the Romans can it?

No it’s not that far below. And in fact the barbarians when they come in and find flourishing ways of Roman life, they very, very rapidly adapt. And for instance, people like the Ostrogoths in Italy happily live in marble palaces. It’s not that they are culturally ill attuned to using the Roman ways. But the collapse of the Roman state with its taxation system, which did redistribute wealth within the empire, and the disruptions caused by military invasion radically interrupt economic life; and basically economic life unravels. It’s a difficult process to understand because we are used to things growing all the time and we are used to economies becoming more and more complex so that, every single year, new bits are added on. But, I think what happens at the end of the Roman world is that economies start to unravel, and in fact it’s a very salutory thing to study because it makes one realise that things like this can happen. Our assumption that things are going to get more and more complicated, more and more sophisticated, and in a sense perpetually better, might be wrong.

How do you chart these incremental changes when there is not very much evidence for them?

Well, the best evidence certainly comes from archaeology because we don’t have, for the immediately post-Roman period, the great runs of documentation you might have for late medieval times or early modern times. We don’t have any data on population or the longevity of life. Archaeology can provide some of that data. It will go on providing better and better data. For example, as more and more skeletons are studied we will get better ideas about the health of population, size of population and the longevity of population. At the moment that’s all quite difficult, partly because people can’t quite agree how you actually age bones. The archaeological data will keep getting more and more all the time.

What I have worked with mainly is pottery. Pottery fortunately has two huge advantages. Firstly, everybody uses pots and secondly pottery survives extraordinarily well in the soil. It breaks very easily but once it’s in the soil it is almost indestructible. A vast mass of pottery have been excavated by archaeologists all over the Roman and post Roman worlds and that shows an extraordinary change. In the Roman period, even at a low level, a peasant might have access to a whole range of pots from a widely different set of kilns, and of very good quality. In the post Roman period, almost all pottery is very local, rather badly made and porous. There is just a huge contrast, most marked in places like Britain but also very noticeable in places like Italy.

So - I’ve argued, and I think I’m right – that if you can see this sort of change in pottery, it probably also happens in all sorts of industries where thinks don’t survive that well, like clothing industries, footwear, metal tools, domestic building; virtually everything.

Presumably that’s not because of a lack of skill. Was it because people were pre-occupied with living more basically?.

To be honest it’s a bit of a mystery....I mean I can show you that a pot made in Britain in 500AD is very different to a pot made in Britain in 400AD, but the pot of course isn’t telling you why. One has to hypothesise. Actually quite a number of technologies do disappear. For example in Britain in 500AD, nobody was making wheel turned pottery. The use of the wheel – which is a very basic technology – completely disappears from the whole British Isles during the 5th century. Equally, for example, the burning of lime to make mortar. There is no mortared building, no new mortared building in 500AD. It’s re-introduced at the very end of the sixth century, particularly from the continent with the return of Christianity. Another technology if you think of it is writing. Writing disappears in Anglo-Saxon Britain in the fifth century. Again this comes back in with Christianity in the sixth century. I find it very puzzling, particularly with something as basic as the use of the wheel for making pottery. It has to be really that the market has collapsed. The market doesn’t exist for people to be specialised enough to invest in the basic things like a potter’s wheel which would enable them to make more pots, because in order to do that they would have to be able to sell more pots. Apparently the market just implodes so that everyone is effectively just making their own. Technologies do depend on a market in order for people to put the investment into buying the tools to make things in a specialised ways and also the investment to train themselves to make them that much better. It is puzzling, and I wouldn’t like to say I am very happy with this explanation, but that’s what it looks like.

Is it accurate to say that when the Western Roman Empire fell we moved into ‘The Dark Ages?’

I think so. Although it’s not necessarily a very fashionable view. The term Dark ages has gone out of fashion, and in many ways rightly so because the problem about it is that it is in many ways morally loaded. The idea that people were in many ways nastier and more brutal, and I think that is in many ways straightforwardly wrong. Not because I think they were terribly nice, but just because I think people have always been extremely unpleasant, and one only has to look at twentieth century to realise that people with more complex technologies can be even more unpleasant to each other than people with basic technologies. So in that sense I think Dark Ages needs to go. I don’t actually use it myself. But in terms of a) availability of evidence - which is one of the reasons they are ‘dark’- yes, definitely. The evidence just disappears, or virtually disappears. In places like Britain you do literally return to pre-history. There is no history. There are no dates for the part of Britain taken over by the Anglo Saxons from about 410 and the return of Christian missionaries in 597. So for 200 years we really don’t know from written records what is going on. So in that sense it’s very dark. And, in cultural and economic terms there is a remarkable simplification. Simplification is a neutral term, but if you want to call it a regression, I don’t think that’s being too judgemental. So yes, I think Dark Ages do happen, although I think the term is too loaded.

According to Ward-Perkins, recovery in Britain was very slow, but by the late eight century AD we begin to see the re-emergence of towns, particularly coastal settlements such as Hamwich (Saxon Southampton) and London as a trading centre. Complex native industries gradually begin to re-emerge, particularly in East Anglia and coinage was slowly re-established from the 7th to 8th centuries. By 800 Britain was roughly similar to what it had been in 1AD in the immediately pre-Roman period.

I would also recommend Tim O Neill's review of Chris Wickman's 'The Inheritance of Rome' and James's short post 'How Dark were the Dark Ages?' for a synopsis of the debate. It's great to see that, despite everyone agreeing that the term 'Dark Ages' is no longer appropriate, no-one can quite bring themselves to stop using it. Unfortunately the unfair, loaded and derogatory terms for historical epochs are usually the most catchy.

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